Joni Mitchell: the accidental conservative?

Over the course of three days of conversations, Mitchell will compare herself to Mozart, Blake and Picasso; she will say that the lyrics to one of her songs "have a lot of symbolic depth, like the Bible" and describe her music as so new it needs its own genre name.

 It was a concert full of pleasant surprises. There was no ceremony about her introduction. Tom Scott, leader of the L. A. Express, Joni's back-up band, merely said "Ladies and Gentlemen, Joni Mitchell."

[snip]

Now, she's dressed in a white blouse and jeans with high-heeled slipper-affair shoes. Cigarette in left hand glass of wine in the right. She looks out at the audience and the arena as if she's never seen it before.

She sat down at the piano and went into a nice version of "Blonde in the Bleachers." One more number and she was gone for good.

Partly because she did not perform at Woodstock, her version has more distance and detachment. Her delivery makes lavish use of dynamics, so that we feel affirmation, then a fading confidence of will. This "Woodstock" is a harrowing lament for hopes dashed and energies tragically wasted. It's an elegy for an entire generation, flamingly altruistic yet hedonistic and self-absorbed, bold yet naive, abundantly gifted yet plagued by self-destruction. These contradictions were on massive display at Woodstock, where the music was pitifully dependent on capitalistic technology and where the noble experiment in pure democracy was sometimes indistinguishable from squalid regression to the primal horde.